Death''s Mistress

  Its light danced off a row of chef’s knives on the wall, some battered copper cookware hanging from a pot rack, and a broom with a solid wood handle in the corner. Any or all of them would have been useful against a large range of creatures, but probably not one who could so completely fool the house wards. And that went for anything I had on me, too.

  I was contemplating sneaking out the back way and doing a Spider-Man impression up to my room, where I had a cache of much nastier weapons. But then the shrieking upstairs stopped. It didn’t taper off; it just cut out between one breath and the next, like a hand had been clenched around a small neck. And suddenly I forgot about subtlety, tactics and strategy. I threw open the door and dove into the dark hallway, knife raised, a battle cry building in my throat.

  And got slammed against a wall hard enough to rattle my ribs.

  Rolling back to my feet, I threw a small table at my enemy, trying to buy myself a second to figure out what the hell I was fighting. But no such luck. I got a glimpse of huge, luminous eyes, with horizontal pupils like a goat’s, and then a ball of fire came out of nowhere, reducing the table to cinders and sending rippling shadows up the walls. I leapt forward, looking for a vulnerable spot, but a massive clawed foot covered in gleaming scales slammed down on me with the force of a jackhammer.

  My back hit the floor with my neck wedged between two curved talons the length of daggers. My own knife had lodged in the ball of the paw pinning me to the boards, between a couple of overlapping scales, but I doubted it was more than a thorn prick to the enormous creature. I thrashed and fought to free my weapon, but only succeeded in driving it a little farther into the thick hide.

  And somewhere above my head, someone cursed, “Cut it out already!”

  I paused at the very human- sounding voice, but I still couldn’t see. And then a thin ribbon of flame shot out of the darkness and lit a row of candles on the wall, all at once. It was a good trick, but I was in no position to admire it. I was too busy staring at the sight of a large dragon wedged into my narrow hallway.

  It didn’t look very comfortable. Its small black wings were squashed against the ceiling, its huge legs were up around its neck and its elongated snout was sticking haphazardly out between them. The only part it appeared to be able to move was its foot, which was leaking a stream of black blood.

  “That hurts like a bitch!” It bent its massive head a little closer to take a look at the damage.

  I just stared.

  An acre of pewter scales was broken by a ridge of gleaming amethyst down its back. Two horns the color of molten glass sat on its head, framing a tuft of absurd lavender hair. It matched the creature’s eyes, which were creepy as hell, but had irises the color of pansy petals.

  A nictitating membrane slid first across one great eye and then the other as the dragon regarded its wounded foot. After a moment, it transferred that alien gaze to me, and the whorl of scales across its cheeks took on a vaguely purple tint. “You stabbed me!”

  “You broke in,” I said slowly, in complete disbelief. Because I’d seen a lot of strange things in Brooklyn, but a dragon wasn’t one of them.

  “I did no such thing!” The huge snout grimaced, showing an awful lot of teeth. But the voice was melodious, almost hypnotic, sliding like a drug into my veins. It soothed my racing pulse back to normal in spite of everything I could do to stop it. I needed the energy of anger to fight, but all of a sudden my body was contemplating having a snooze, and my muscles were going limp and noodle-y.

  “I don’t usually argue with anyone capable of crushing the life out of me,” I said, fighting back a yawn. “But yeah, you did.”

  “It’s my house!” A fold of skin that had been held flat against the creature’s back suddenly opened, spreading upward like translucent fan to frame its long snout. “What are you waiting for?” it demanded. “Get it out!”

  I assumed “it” meant the knife, so I resumed tugging on it. “It would help if you’d let me up,” I said after a minute.

  “Are you going to throw anything else at me?”

  “Are you going to eat me?”

  The eyes did the creepy sideways blink again. I was starting to wonder if that was the dragon equivalent of an eye roll. “Don’t be ridiculous, Dory! You know damn well I’m vegan.”

  The foot rose and I slid out from between the gigantic toenails. They were black at the roots, shading to gray and then clear at the ends like the horns. Except for a few spots where flakes of bright red appeared. They looked suspiciously like nail polish, which was when I decided to stop thinking at all.

  The knife finally slipped free, and the second it cleared the tough hide, a cold blue-white light swelled out from between the scales as if the huge body was cracking down fault lines. And then an explosion of light hit me like a fist, throwing me back a yard. I landed hard against the faded wallpaper, jarring a hanging mirror loose. It crashed against the floor, and the screeching from upstairs started up again.

  “God, do I need a drink,” a voice said fervently.

  My thoughts exactly.

  I sat up as someone pushed through the kitchen door and headed for the liquor cabinet. I got to my hands and knees and peered around the jamb, only to see a tall, naked redhead standing in the lantern light. She was glaring at the empty liquor cabinet. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone teetotaler!”

  “No,” I said cautiously, sizing this new shape up.

  It looked like Claire, my old roommate. The illusion was perfect, down to the little details that spells usually overlook. The creature’s hair was a red fuzz ball, the way Claire’s always got in rainy weather; there was a familiar pattern of freckles over the nose; and the arms were crossed under the breasts in an often-used expression of annoyance.

  But there were discordant notes, too. This Claire had bruise-dark circles under her eyes, which kept darting nervously around the kitchen, and a sickly pallor beneath her freckles. Her lips were white and pressed tightly together, and she looked like she hadn’t slept in a while, like she was running on nerves.

  But the real clincher was that Claire wouldn’t show up in the middle of the night, unescorted, barefoot and wild-eyed. When I met her, she’d been working a bad-paying job at a magical auction house and had needed a roommate for the extra cash. But that was before a real-life fey prince turned up at one of the sales and swept her off her feet—and all the way to Faerie. She’d been there ever since, presumably living the happily-ever-after that the rest of us just dream about.

  “It’s a damn good glamourie,” I said, wondering exactly how one evicted a dragon, even in human form, from one’s kitchen. “But for future reference, Claire didn’t make a habit of running around naked. Not even in her own house.”

  “I was wearing clothes!” the creature said, snatching an apron from a drawer. It was the old-fashioned type that was more like a dress, leaving her decent as long as she didn’t turn around. “I burst out of them whenever I change now. My dragon self has hit adolescence and it’s growing like a weed.”

  I stared from the drawer with the aprons—I hadn’t known we had any—to the woman shrugging one on. “Dragon self?”

  She pushed limp red strands off her forehead with the back of her hand. “I’m half Dark Fey, Dory. You know that!”

  “Yeah, but . . . you never mentioned what kind!”

  “I didn’t know until recently, and anyway, it’s not the kind of thing you just drop into conversation.” She located a box of aspirin in a drawer and peered at the label myopically. Those pretty green eyes had always been nearsighted, and I guess going scaly would make it a bitch to keep up with glasses.

  I got slowly to my feet, my head spinning. “Claire?”

  “Who were you expecting?” she demanded. “Attila the Hun?”

  Her eyes focused on the cleaver I still held in one hand, which was leaking blood—nonhuman black—all over the kitchen tiles. Dragon’s blood was corrosive, which probably explained why half the blade was gone and the tiles lo
oked like mice had been gnawing at them. I took what remained of the knife to the sink and rinsed it off, then put it back in the rack.

  That seemed to reassure her, because she pulled something out from behind her legs and plopped it into a kitchen chair. It must have been behind her in the hall, because I hadn’t seen it before. I slowly approached the table, regarding this new problem cautiously.

  The small towheaded creature appeared to be human. He—at least, I assumed it was a he, judging by the natty blue tunic he had on—looked to be around a year old. But he nonetheless gazed calmly back, remarkably composed considering what he had just witnessed.

  “What is that?” I asked, as he drooled a little onto his tunic.

  Claire dry swallowed the aspirin. “The heir to the throne of Faerie.”

  “The heir to the throne of Faerie just spit up.”

  “He does that a lot. He’s teething.”

  I blinked. “Teething? Teething? He’s teething and you get spit?”

  “Why? What did you expect?”

  I waved my arms. “That!”

  “That noise?”

  “Yes! That horrible, screeching noise that goes on and on and—”

  “That’s a baby?”

  “A baby Duergar. Well, half anyway,” I amended. “The other half is Brownie, or so they said. I’m beginning to think it’s more like banshee.”

  “You mean that little thing you picked up at the auction?” She located a box of Band-Aids and slapped one on her toe.

  And okay, the apron thing could have been a fluke, but there weren’t too many people who knew where I’d acquired my current affliction. The magical auction had been highly illegal and very hush- hush. That wasn’t surprising, considering that they were selling illegal hybrids of supernatural creatures, some quite dangerous. I hadn’t even known it was taking place until I accidently raided it.

  As weird as it seemed, this actually was Claire.

  “Yes,” I told her, my head swimming with questions. I hadn’t seen her in over a month. It seemed like she’d picked up a few new abilities while she’d been gone.

  “But he already had teeth,” she objected, frowning into the empty fridge.

  “Those were his baby teeth. I’ve been finding them all over the house. Now the big-boy teeth are coming in and . . . Claire, I think I’m going crazy.”

  “You’re not going crazy.”

  “I just saw you morph into a dragon!”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have startled me!” She opened the breadbox and stared at the mass of paper inside. “Don’t you keep any food in the house?”

  “I got takeout.”

  Her eyes latched onto the big white bags, which were spreading the smell of sesame chicken, veggie chow mein and fried rice around the kitchen. “It looks like you brought enough for three people,” she said hopefully.

  “Yeah. I don’t know when we’ll get to eat it, though. What with all the commotion.”

  Her eyes narrowed, and for a moment, she looked an awful lot like her alter ego. “Where’s this baby of yours?”

  I grinned.

  Chapter Three

  I led the way upstairs and Claire followed with her own quiet, well-behaved little bundle. The decibel level increased with every step, until I was sure the walls would crack with it. We opened the door to my old office and even Claire, who had seemed remarkably unmoved, winced.

  Then she went in and the screeching abruptly stopped. A small, hairy head popped up from a nest of quilts under the bed and stared at her with wide gray eyes. Its owner looked like a cross between a monkey and a little old man: long, furry limbs, tiny squashed face and wild Muppet hair.

  The unshed tears trembling on his lashes seemed to distill the moonlight filtering through the curtains, making his irises gleam like polished metal for a moment. Then he blinked and the tears coursed down his cheeks—and the noise started up again. Until Claire calmly walked over and picked him up.

  He’d opened his mouth for another scream, but closed it again with a pop. A tiny hand with long, stick-like fingers grasped the frilly strap of her apron and he looked at her beseechingly, like I’d been beating him or something. “Why is he under the bed?” she demanded.

  “He likes it under there,” I said defensively. “Duergars live underground, and I think it makes him feel vulnerable, being in the open when he sleeps. I tried putting him on the bed, but he just drags everything down there anyway.”

  Claire didn’t look like she thought much of that explanation, but she let it go. “What have you been giving him for the pain?”

  “Everything. But he’s like me—drugs don’t work and whiskey only dulls it for a—”

  “Whiskey?” Claire looked appalled. “Tell me you didn’t just admit to trying to get your baby drunk!”

  “I was just trying to rub some on his gums!” I said, offended. “He’s the one who grabbed the bottle!”

  “He’s just a baby, poor little thing!”

  “I know that,” I said miserably. “And the alcohol didn’t have much effect, anyway—”

  “Dory!”

  “I know what you’re thinking! I suck at this motherhood thing!” It didn’t help that I hadn’t actually thought of Stinky as a “baby” when I took him on. Someone had been about to kill him, I’d objected and, the next thing I knew, he was mine.

  I hadn’t been too worried about it at the time, as he’d been more in the “pet” category in my mind. But experience had shown that there was a definite intelligence at work there—a fact I tried not to think about too much because it freaked me the hell out.

  “You don’t,” Claire said patiently. “You saved his life. You’ve given him a home. You just need time to adjust, that’s all.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to last that long.”

  She smiled slightly. “Everybody thinks that way at first. They’re these little people, with big, trusting eyes and an absolute confidence that we know everything, when most of the time, we don’t have a clue.”

  Yeah, that was what worried me. I’d brought myself up, more or less, and look how that had turned out. I didn’t want to screw him up, too, but there didn’t seem to be an alternative.

  There were damn few dhampirs in existence, since we could only be conceived in a very short window after a man was Changed. And despite what the movies would have people believe, most newly made vampires weren’t thinking sex. They were thinking blood.

  Mircea had been a little different, because he was cursed, not made. He’d failed to realize that the old Gypsy woman who’d been ranting at him had been the real deal for a week, until some nobles tried to kill him and he didn’t die. In the meantime, he’d gone about his usual playboy ways, resulting in a bouncing baby abomination nine months later.

  I could count on two hands the number of dhampirs I knew who were currently living, and I wouldn’t even need all the fingers. But as far as I knew, there were no other Duergar-Brownie mixes at all. Stinky was in a class by himself, and I knew from personal experience where that left him.

  It wasn’t anywhere good.

  Claire patted my shoulder. “Do you at least have a babysitter?”

  I nodded to the small, huddled figure in the corner, who was trying to hide behind the rocking chair. “It’s okay, Gessa. You can go.”

  Two tiny brown eyes peered at me myopically for a moment from under a fall of dark brown curls. Then their owner jumped to her full height of three foot two and scurried out the door. She never needed to be told twice.

  “Olga was doing it,” I said, referring to the very competent secretary I’d recently acquired. “But she’s trying to start her business up again, and she can’t stay all night. And the freeloaders downstairs scatter to the four winds every time I so much as look at—”

  “What freeloaders?”

  Oops. “Uh, well, when they heard she’d moved out here, some of Olga’s old employees decided to come, too. And since they’re also relatives, she didn’t feel like sh
e could say no. . . .”

  “Are you trying to tell me that there’s a colony of trolls living in my basement?”

  “I probably should have worked up to it more.”

  “At least that explains the smell.”

  “That’s Stinky,” I admitted. “He believes in living up to his name.”

  “Well, maybe you should get him a better one!”

  “I tried. There are no colonies of Brownies around here, but I located some Duergars who live over in Queens. But they just told me they thought he was already well named!”

  “He’s a half-breed,” she said sadly, her fingers carding through his hair. “They probably didn’t like him.”

  “They did tell me that their people have to earn their names. They just use a nickname before then.”

  “Earn them how?”

  “They didn’t say. But the elders have to award them, apparently, and you can guess what the odds are of that in his case. When he gets older, I’ll let him decide what he wants to be called.” I pushed up the window, letting in the night breeze. “And it’s not so bad once you get—”

  I broke off abruptly. For the second time that night, I saw something that had me questioning my sanity. More than usual, I mean.

  The trees on the lot are mostly original, and the granddaddy of them all grew outside that window: a massive, old cottonwood that had to have been more than a sapling when the house was built. Its tear- shaped leaves were dancing as the wind swept along the side of the house, causing a rustling, shifting kaleidoscope of dark green, silver and deep black. And for a moment, in the contrast of light and shadow, I thought I saw . . .

  “Dory—” Claire touched my shoulder and I flinched. She frowned. “What is it?”

  “Do you see . . . anything . . . in the tree?” I asked, trying to keep my voice light.

  She peered around. “What? You mean the squirrel’s nest?”

  I swallowed. “I think I need a drink.”